This is an archival version of The Penrose Cube, representing the list that was featured in the main event at CubeCon 2023 (Oct. 19-22, 2023, in Madison, WI).

The Penrose Cube was designed with the following guiding principles and inspirations:

• Budget-friendly: Total cost less than $200 and no individual card costing more than $2.
• Synergistic: While it may be possible to draft a "good stuff" deck, this should not be the optimal way to play if winning is the goal. (To enable this, the cube breaks singleton for a number of key payoffs or enablers. In each of these cases, two copies of a card are included in the cube.)
• Make the graveyard great: Lots of graveyard synergies (Inspired by @Zennith's UMA-Inspired Cube and @enderwiggin77's The Graveyard Cube)
• Playable on the go: Just 360 cards, no counters, no dice, no tokens (Inspired by @Gallently's Bar Cube)

It aims to incentivize highly synergistic deckbuilding, reading signals during draft, and complex play lines.

Primary Archetypes & Synergies

• Artifacts - , secondary in
• Madness - , secondary in
• Flicker -
• Graveyard - , tertiary in
• Aristocrats - , tertiary in
• Domain - , tertiary in

Color Pie

The following game elements are exclusively (or almost exclusively) found in the following colors:

• Fliers -
• Creature removal - , with a few limited exceptions in
• Large creatures -
• Artifact removal - , secondary in
• Enchantment removal - , secondary in

Backstory

This cube would not exist without CubeCon! For a long time, I had considered Ultimate Masters to be one of the most fun draft environments WotC had ever created, and had been bouncing around the idea of creating a cube that captured some of the synergies and feel of that limited environment. Bored on my flight to Madison in 2022, I started pulling together lists of cards that might be good candidates for the cube.

I was pleasantly surprised upon arriving at CubeCon to learn that there was actually a cube with this exact concept there: @Zennith's UMA-Inspired Cube. I had the pleasure of getting to play the cube (even getting to play against a really nicely tuned Thermo-Alchemist deck assembled by @Zennith in round 3) on the second day of CubeCon 2022, and walked away absolutely convinced I had to put together my own UMA-inspired cube.

Upon returning home, while tinkering around with the concept, I came across @Gallently's Bar Cube (in a tweet perhaps?) and really liked the idea of making a cube specifically designed to be easy to play in a bar. In other words, on the small side, no tokens, no counters, no cards you care about getting damaged or stolen. While I wanted to maintain some more traditional cube elements (such as being able to draft with 8 players) and found some of the proposed restrictions (such as not using sleeves) too limiting, I took a lot of inspiration from this cube in putting together my now only partially UMA-inspired cube.

Ultimately, I ended up with a design that I am really proud of, and which I think occupies a very unique place in the cube ecosystem:

And as for the name, the cube is named after my neighborhood in Arlington, VA.